Low-cost soft sensors and robots for leak detection in operating water pipes

Every day, about 20% of the clean water produced in the world is lost due to pipe leaks. Due to limitations in available technologies, most of the leaks are either not found, or found too late. Every year, there are 240,000 water pipe breaks in the US, and many of them cause sinkholes and other severe damage to the infrastructure. Water utilities need methods for detecting and locating such leaks before they become big breaks, so that they can perform preventative maintenance. This is to save water and protect infrastructure. This thesis presents the design, analysis, fabrication and field test validations of such a solution. I developed soft robots for early detection of leaks in water pipes when the water service is on. This work introduces four key contributions: (1) Design, fabrication and field validations of soft robots for operating water pipes (2) Design, fabrication and field validations of a tactile sensor for detecting leaks in operating water pipes (3) Differentiate leaks from false positives with a low-cost soft bending angle sensor (4) A practical, minimalism approach to the in-pipe localization, specifically for soft robots. The results are validated in simulations, lab, and field experiments. Those sensors and robots are designed to be low-cost and scalable. They are fabricated with ordinary material with ordinary tools. It is a sub-500-dollar solution to a multi-billion-dollar water and infrastructure problem.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Wu, You, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Kamal Youcef-Toumi.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/118022

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/118022